Companies have spent years making money from consumers’ personal data. Verb wants consumers to start setting the price themselves.
Verb, a data exchange company, launched a marketplace Thursday that lets everyday people sell access to their personal data straight to companies, including the AI labs hungry for training material, Axios first reported.
The pitch comes as AI companies continue to acquire data from publishers, app developers and data brokers. Verb is trying to change the role consumers play in that economy, moving them from the source of data to its sellers.
“[People] will go to monetize something that for decades we’ve given away for free,” Cyrus Beschloss, Verb’s CEO and co-founder, told Axios.
How the marketplace works
Signing up means installing the Verb tracker on your phone, which then begins logging selected activity — think shopping habits and social media use. Users can toggle off categories they’d rather keep private, and the more data shared, the more money they can potentially make.
Sellers set their own price, though Verb gives an estimate based on how much information is shared. Any company can then buy that data, but users have the option to block specific buyers they don’t want to deal with, according to Axios.
Verb expects AI companies to become some of its biggest customers because developing increasingly capable models requires enormous amounts of training data, according to Beschloss.
The company believes this could create “a completely new asset class,” Beschloss said. The idea is not entirely new. Mercor connects AI companies with people who generate training data or evaluate AI outputs, while Vana, a startup spun out of MIT, lets users pool their data and collectively decide which companies can use it.
Privacy comes with a price
The biggest hurdle may be convincing people that selling access to their data is worth the privacy tradeoff.
Verb says it excludes sensitive categories such as passwords, text messages and health data from its analysis. Still, a marketplace built around personal information creates obvious risks if data is exposed or misused. Beschloss acknowledged the possibility of breaches and said security was considered in the platform’s design.
“If we can’t tell users that their data is safe, then we are not a company… and we don’t deserve to be if we can’t do that,” he said.
The bigger bet
Verb’s real test is whether consumers see personal data as something they should be paid for rather than something they simply surrender in exchange for online services.
If the model catches on, it could give AI companies another source of behavioral data while shifting some of the economics back toward the people generating it. But it would also create a new incentive to share more — making the price of privacy part of the transaction itself.
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